Disney

For several years, a compilation of Oscar-nominated short films - in animation, live action, and documentary - has opened in theaters across the globe , making those categories on Academy Award night not as foreign or inaccessible as they used to be. This season's entries again include a variety of styles, themes and locations, ranging from the Ayn Rand School for Tots where the perpetually silent Maggie Simpson is dropped off at The Longest Daycare to Buzkashi Boys and the cacophonous streets of Kabul.

The new Disneynature film Chimpanzee started off the way most movies do. Co-producers and directors Mark Linfield and Alastair Fothergill, who had previously worked together on the documentary film Earth, approached Disney with a 70-page script about a group of chimpanzees living in Western Africa. There was just one problem: Chimps don't take direction — or read scripts.

So Fothergill and Linfield teased out a narrative from more than three years' worth of footage they took in Western Africa while observing a large clan of chimpanzees.